Airport Security
Travelled to Canberra last week to do some teaching at the ANU. In my hand luggage was a small Debian/Linux machine, an SV24 cube. These things look great on the x-ray scanners, full of different bits of metal, wires everywhere, different densities, and so on. The bag also contained power cords, ethernet cable, wireless keyboard and mouse, and other bits and pieces.

Of course, airport security doesn't like metallic boxes filled with wires that aren't easily identifiable... or do they? As it happened, once I had removed the machine from the bag I was hit with a barrage of questions, but not the type I had expected. "That's so cool! Where can I buy one of those?", "How fast was the CPU did you say? And what are you running on it?", "You mean I could play games from my hotel room TV? Sweet!"

Work
Keeping in the trend of calling me out the blue at the end of the financial year, another old client of mine wants me to do a reasonably large amount of work as soon as possible. I've actually been giving quotes on how much I'll charge to work on weekends.

Some of my clients are a real delight to work with. I've mostly finished a shared address-book setup for one, running on an LDAP backend, Outlook MUAs, and LABE for management. They're even a feel-good organisation who are working to try and reduce the community's energy usage. I wish more of my clients were like that, rather than seeking to enhance their market share.